I have been having some difficulty with my new project: lots of stops, starts, changing direction… changing size, do I use the water brushes or not? How about ink layers? UGH…
I haven’t really liked many of my experiments these past couple of weeks, which has resulted in too much time spent overthinking, over planning and not enough time playing.
Inevitably, I ended up overworking a picture two weeks ago, but managed to save the part that I thought was working for future ideas:
I tried out some new shapes and used a combination of the water brushes and the Sharpies and I believe that this has something interesting going for it, so I tried a different approach last week and am really enjoying the results:
I did stop at this point and added this to the studio wall for the time being. There is a idea that is slowly developing on how to finish this picture, but in the meantime, I wanted to move onto some other new ideas until the solution was more concrete in my head. Kind of looks like a snowflake right now, so maybe just adding some ink layers behind it would make it “pop” and give it a more finished look.
In 2017 I completed a picture called Totem (see below) that consisted of four 4×4 squares that I thought had some series potential, but really hadn’t managed to get around to exploring it and shelved the idea. That is, until yesterday.
I had been trying to use up some leftover paper and wanted to challenge myself when I started playing with a 9.5×22 piece of scrap paper and ended up thinking about Totem:
The idea is to “layer” the shapes, trying to give them a new look and maybe a new dimension. So far, I like way this is developing. Now back to playing 🙂
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